Ladies of America: Woman up. You’ve put the kids on the school bus, and your husband is leaving for work. Stand in the doorway and blow him a kiss. Then hasten to finish packing. Walk out that door. Don’t look back.
Goodness knows how many times you’ve thought about leaving. But then the guilt always filled your gut and the shame would rise in your heart. Not this time though. Because you are not missing out on another getaway with your girlfriends to Martha’s Vineyard. No husbands, no kids, no problem!
Your getaway vehicle just pulled up outside. It brims with a few too many wheelie bags, totes, laptop carriers, just-in-case rain slickers, sacks of road munchies, and Betsy’s hypo-allergenic bed pillow. Every window frames a girlish grin.
Oh, there’s nothing quite like the girlfriend getaway. It’s the quintessential respite from work, stress, and the people you love – people who may also happen to be your main source of work and stress. Unless, of course, you’re short on people to love, and that’s stressful too. So for a week or just a weekend, you gather on the Vineyard with soul mates of the Venus persuasion. People who “get it.” Maybe your college buddies, book club, longtime co-workers, or biological sisters. You may be thirty-somethings, fifty-somethings, or beyond. You may be multi-generational. Whatever. The Vineyard is as good a girlfriend getaway place as they come.
Save summertime for the full-blown Vineyard vacay, family-style. The girlfriend getaway seems better suited to the budding of springtime, the languor of autumn, or even the briskness of winter. And, hey, those are the bargain seasons, relatively speaking, and at least one girlfriend is bound to be the miserly sort – the kind who calculates and splits the restaurant tab to the last sou. You settle into a place that would make real men shudder – a flowery B&B or maybe a gingerbread cottage, madcap in pastels and surely built for elves. You vow to eat healthy and sip herbal teas. You’ll take Anusara yoga classes and mindful walks along the north shore. You might take a pottery class or a tour of the arboretum. You may discover you can still ride a bike. You’ll all welcome those hot stone massages and mud wraps the next day.
In the quiet of evening, you’ll gather cross-legged on cushions amid candlelight, and on sisterly shoulders, you’ll unburden woes: A job loss. A medical diagnosis. An adult offspring who can’t find himself. A declining parent. You may indulge in a favorite chick flick on DVD before falling asleep to a fog horn or the hum of pinkletinks and the aromatherapy of the lavender you bought at the farmer’s market.
Enough already, girlfriends! Your halos are bound to slip. Let it be. You’re going to open your wallets in the face of beguiling non-essentials in boutiques so gender-biased, they could be charged with discrimination. You’ll crunch deeply fried seafood and slurp heaping scoops of maple walnut; your man is nowhere around to look askance at your hips. You’ll drink wine, and the theme of your discourse will drift from the global economy to somebody’s first husband’s second wife.
Come the last night of your stay, you’ll all get dolled up and go someplace with a lively bar and maybe some music. All of you except that Betsy, of course, who dolls up in pajamas for an evening at home and crashes by 8 p.m.; before daybreak, she alone will leap out of bed and sprint three miles to catch the first peek of sunrise over the Sound. As for the rest of you: You are perched on barstools, chatting and snickering over mojitos. The sassy sandals you sprang for this morning dangle provocatively from your toes – the very toes that got polished and buffed at the spa.
At the end of the bar, you may notice the presence of your alter-egos: a bunch of guys. Yes, there’s such a thing on the Vineyard as the guy getaway too. Tanned and unbuttoned to the chest hairs, they’re rehashing the day’s golf game or conquests of large stripers. They’re also glancing over at the bunch of you. You mostly ignore them. You’re already in really good company.
And besides: You’re thinking of your daughter and the big shard of cobalt sea glass you can’t wait to show her. You’re reliving yesterday’s catamaran cruise, imagining your seaworthy man at the helm, instead of the boy captain with the skimpy beard. The girlfriend getaway has been a five-star hit. You’re sated now. If you get in the standby line tomorrow, maybe you can even catch an earlier ferry home.
An abbreviated version of this essay originally aired on WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, where Shelley regularly reads her essays for both 90.1 FM and www.capeandislands.org.
